Webflow Buys Intellimize: Why It's An Intelligent Buy

When it comes to AI, every technology vendor is being compelled to go with the flow.

Seriously, though, is it even a choice? Can you afford to sidestep the infusion of artificial intelligence into your platform? Can you kick the LLM down the digital field and “wait 'n see” how it all shakes out? 

Probably not – if you want to stay in parity with competitors. And therein lies the challenge: trying to decipher where the real value is.

By all accounts, we’re already in the next wave of AI, well beyond the pioneering jaunt of generative, ChatGPT-infused innovation. According to most market watchers, the first phase of AI looked “pretty,” but this next one lacks the bullishness and irrational exuberance of its predecessor. 

The big tech and cloud players aside (lots of drama there), AI startups are struggling to generate revenue in the freemium-enabled world of generative tools. The model field is also getting crowded, with darlings like Stability.ai announcing today that it will lay off 10% of its workforce.

OK, OK. Enough with the bad news. Behind it all, AI is still plenty miraculous, and we can’t discount its current and future impact across the stack – particularly in places where it can automate and scale functions that inject value into the equation.

One such example could be Webflow with its acquisition of Intellimize – an AI-driven website personalization and conversion rate optimization platform. Webflow, a website builder by category, just announced that this is a major step in its vision to expand beyond visual development and become the world’s first “Website Experience Platform.”

We hear a lot these days about AI features (think text and image generation) being added to website builders and content management tools. So why is this one such a big deal? 

Because as relevant as content generation is, optimization is a place where AI can make a huge difference at scale – specifically within the pillars of personalization and experimentation. Brands have struggled in this area, and AI is finally delivering the resources needed to produce variants, test options, and improve performance.

According to Webflow’s announcement, the company plans to integrate Intellimize’s feature set into its core experience over the coming months, and we can expect the tools and capabilities to be available later this year. 

Empowering the entire marketing team

Webflow is, without doubt, one of the most robust visual web design tools on the market. It enables users to build and launch responsive websites without writing any code. 

As an all-in-one platform, Webflow powers the complete lifecycle of a website, from idea to ready-to-use product. The UX is chock-full of detailed features and controls, allowing you to add and edit components on a web page visually in real time. If you're jonesing for a closer look, you can check out a previous review of the platform that our team conducted. 

Unlike other site builders, Webflow doesn't parse visual design and code. What a user creates in its visual editor is powered by HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. In that sense, it’s “pure,” abiding by modern web standards without proprietary guardrails that limit its extensibility. 

Webflow appeals to marketing teams and web agencies across the spectrum, providing a no-code design toolbox that feels very much informed by desktop publishing tools like Adobe Photoshop. This familiarity is intentional, giving visual designers a UX that’s clean, intuitive, and packed with granular control for creating unique web experiences.  

Of course, building a website is just the first step. As Vlad Magdalin – Webflow’s Co-founder and CEO – explained in a recent blog post, enterprise teams were hitting the wall when it came to optimizing their sites.

“As we’ve started to work with larger teams like Orangetheory Fitness, IDEO, and Dropbox, we realized that there are major problems with how web experiences are being created,” he explained. “Once a website is built, it’s extremely difficult for marketing teams to personalize it, to experiment to make it better, and to optimize it to meet the varying needs of their customers.”

Vlad further expressed how modern tools for optimizing websites are often cumbersome to set up without significant engineering support. In many cases, they’re also too hard to use separately from where the source website content is designed and managed. 

“At Webflow, this is the next big problem we are solving,” Vlad stated. “Our goal is to give marketing teams and web agencies the ability not only to build incredible web experiences, but also seamlessly personalize those sites for different audiences, easily create experiments to test which versions perform better, and to optimize their buyer journey throughout their website to drive conversions and revenue.”

This is where Intellimize drives everything home.

Unlocking the ‘Website Experience Platform’ with AI 

Founded in 2016 and headquartered in San Mateo, CA, Intellimize has been steadily climbing the silicon ladder. As of its Series B round in 2021, the company had raised a stout $52 million, with revenues still hovering under $8 million last year. Still early stage, but that was a 34% YOY increase – definitely a mark of forward momentum.

With nearly $130 million in revenue from its subscription-based business service, Webflow is reaching the right point on the growth arc to feel its M&A oats. And like Salesforce hunting for Informatica, the focus on AI-specific acquisitions is a marked trend. 

Now endowed with the keys to optimization, Vlad sees the combination of Intellimize’s features as a pathway to a new vision – what he calls the “Website Experience Platform.” 

“With this vision, we’re taking the most important part of the digital experience – the website – and creating a seamlessly integrated and visual-first platform that allows marketing teams to break their dependence on code and innovate at speeds they could never reach before,” he described. “We believe that this will not only lead to empowered, revenue-driving marketing teams, but also to a better experience for everyone on the web.”

As a platform, Intellimize brings key advantages to the table. First and foremost, it effectively unlocks a marketing team’s ability to personalize web experiences without the need for complex and cumbersome engineering support. On this point, both Webflow and Intellimize shared a common philosophical goal for unlocking a marketing’s team’s code-dependence by building visual-first tools – the kind they could use without needing constant help from a dev team.

Since its founding, Intellimize has made a huge impact on customers like Sumo Logic (1B+ page versions, 53% lift in conversion rates), Snowflake (60% increase in conversions, 49% lift in meetings booked), and Drift (129% improvement in conversions, $2.8M incremental revenue).

Those are great stats – and more importantly, clear evidence that Intellimize delivers value. 

Why it matters

For the last decade, Webflow has been backfilling the gap between pedestrian no-code website builders and hardcore development platforms. They’ve cultivated a vast community of designers, marketers, and agencies that often feel underwhelmed by Wix and disillusioned by complex code and compromises. 

These visual-motivated users always seem to be asking the same question: Why can’t I just design it the way I want?

Indeed.

With the rise of Figma and other popular prototyping tools, visual designers have recovered some control of the experience. Now, they can produce more uniquely sophisticated compositions and forget about the wall of code awaiting them. With Webflow, they can wrestle away the dependency on developers – at least for the most part – and maintain control from idea to launch. Webflow also sports its own built-in CMS, providing a more flexible solution for managing content as part of a single platform solution. 

At the same time, Webflow is appealing to developers by providing a pathway for creating apps. With a community of 3.5 million users, Webflow developers can access the platform’s API to build products that support how users design websites. This includes forms and e-commerce apps that serve a wide range of use cases.  

By all accounts, the Intellimize acquisition is an ideal match for Webflow, and may be the key to evolving its current visual builder into a next-gen Website Experience Platform. As Vlad framed in his announcement, Webflow’s mission is to “bring development superpowers to everyone.” With a new crop of optimization and personalization capabilities at the ready, they’re going full Kryptonian – and will be better equipped to compete with CMS and DXP solutions that offer optimization features. 

This was happening even before the Intellimize news. I’ve spoken to numerous digital agencies and SIs over the last year – at least two that are focused on WordPress and Drupal – and many are adding Webflow to their mix. Why? Because the platform has become easier to work with, and the incentives have become more attractive (that’s almost a verbatim quote). 

The expansion of optimization capabilities also reflects a tacit focus on enterprise customers. As Vlad noted, Webflow uncovered the need for these capabilities while working work with larger teams at major brands like OrangeTheory and Dropbox. This suggests that Webflow is finding success with companies at a level where scalable, AI-powered personalization is central to their digital strategy. 

Still, AI is no panacea. In fact, it’s reducing the barrier to entry and creating more downstream innovation. At the top, Squarespace is offering generative content for a range of website elements, but smaller players like Divi are providing a personal AI web design assistant for creating layouts, content, and images on the fly.

And then, of course, there’s Dorik – a nascent platform that allows you to design, build, and edit websites using nothing but prompts. I’m talking about fully mobile-responsive sites that look pretty decent for something created via a GPT-like field. I’ve tried it, and while it still has a ways to go, it could be a significant challenge to established vendors in the next few years. 

Relative to AI, my guess is that we’ll continue to see accelerated innovation from Webflow over the coming months. But this acquisition is a smart play to kick that pace off, as it addresses a current pain point while delivering tangible value to its customers. To come full circle, adding AI features for the sake of AI can prove deleterious – especially now. 

Webflow is often viewed as a complex tool that requires significant training (it's true – they have their own University). This is ironic when you think about the goal of eliminating the complexity of code from the equation. But as someone who started in HTML and used Adobe products, I’ve always found Webflow's UI easy to traverse. In this sense, it has always known its market with a level of intimacy that translates into success. 

My advice: keep goin' with the flow…

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